Share

When Robots Come for Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?

Visitors look at robot arms of Panasonic on display during the China International Robot Show 2013 in Shanghai, China, 2013.

Visitors look at robot arms of Panasonic on display during the China International Robot Show 2013 in Shanghai, China, 2013. Imaginechina via AP Images

Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human counterparts. That’s why Apple’s supplier Foxconn is reported to be replacing up to one million workers with robots in order to meet expected demand for the iPhone 6. And it’s why Amazon deploys an army of robots to fetch items in its warehouses. It’s also why machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are now reading MRIs, sorting through thousands of legal cases to identify pertinent information, and writing news articles.

The displacement of workers by technology is nothing new, of course, but the nature of our rapidly advancing technology is, as is the wide variety of roles it’s poised to replace.

To survive in this new environment, we human beings face some pressing questions: What can we do better than smart machines? How can more of us make sure that we are able to compete against them?

#### Edward D. Hess

##### About

Edward D. Hess is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of 11 books. His newest, *Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization*, will be published in September.

How the Robot Tsunami Will Remake the Workplace

On the heels of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age and John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines, we’ve heard a lot about the AI tsunami. Some “techno-optimists” are not as concerned as I am about its potential negative impact on workers. For example, the well-respected serial tech entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen predicts that the economy will create new (as yet unknown) jobs for those displaced by AI, just as it has in the wake of past technological developments.

But a 2013 study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford suggests a degree of labor destruction in the coming years that’s difficult to comprehend. They looked at 702 types of jobs in the United States and made judgments about whether there was a low, medium, or high risk that technology would displace workers in those jobs over the next 10 to 20 years.

Their startling conclusions: 47 percent of total U.S. employees have a high risk of being displaced by technology, and 19 percent have a medium risk. That means that 66 percent of the U.S. workforce has a medium to high risk of job destruction. If they are only half right, the numbers are staggering.

How to Find Work When the Robots Arrive

The jobs at the greatest risk of being replaced by technology are those that involve repetitive activities that can be performed in a relatively stable environment—or, in other words, that do not require the ability to perceive and adapt to subtle changes or to engage on an emotional level with other people. If you are in manufacturing, packing, construction, maintenance, agriculture, food service, cleaning services, or lawn care, for example, Frey and Osborne’s research could lead you to conclude that you should get training for a job that requires the perception of changing circumstances and corresponding physical motion and dexterity. Those are skills that you can hone, but which are still very hard for robots to do.

What are the safest jobs? Frey and Osborne predict that the low-risk jobs are in science, engineering, the arts, education, health care, law, and business management. What do those jobs have in common? Workers in those areas generally need high-level cognitive or emotional skills. They must know how to think critically and innovatively, and/or they need to have developed high levels of social and emotional intelligence. Those are skills that technology is not likely to master soon.

But the problem is that plenty of people haven’t mastered them, either. The past 25 years of research in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and education have demonstrated that we are cognitively biased, lazy thinkers. As the sociologist and learning expert Jack Mezirow has said, “We have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit our preconceptions.” We are often emotionally defensive, inclined to protect our image of ourselves and our views of the world, which can lead to what Harvard professor Chris Argyris called “defensive reasoning.”

Most of us have not been taught in school or on the job the cognitive and emotional skills we need. So we must acquire them. It won’t be easy, but we can learn to manage our emotions better and stop them from dominating our thinking. We can get better at embracing evidence that contradicts our views of the world. We can learn to engage emotionally with other people in a way that no machine can.

Honing Our Emotional Intelligence

Where to start? By putting ourselves in an environment that can teach us those skills. Employers can play a crucial role here—some already are. At Bridgewater Associates, LP, one of the most successful hedge funds in the world, Ray Dalio, the founder and former CEO, institutionalized processes and practices that help employees overcome their natural cognitive and emotional proclivities. For example, employees participate in frequent “drill down” conversations meant to take their thinking to a higher level and to illuminate personal weaknesses that interfere with logical thought. Such “radical transparency” has come to define Bridgewater’s culture: Everyone is subjected to the same kind of honest feedback. Everyone is urged to “get above yourself” to look at a problem or issue as objectively as possible.

Pixar Animation Studios has its own system designed to promote candor and constructive, creative conflict. An important part of this are frequent “Braintrust” meetings, at which work products are reviewed and critiqued in a way that teaches people to receive feedback with an open mind, without their egos getting in the way, and to become comfortable knowing what they do not know.

Those of us who don’t work in these kinds of environments face a greater challenge. But we can develop our cognitive and emotional skills by other means. Taking courses in a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and sciences can help. So can reading—books in the field of design thinking contain useful tools for learning to think more innovatively. There are also online resources to bolster critical thinking skills, such as those available at the Foundation for Critical Thinking.

This kind of personal learning and development happens best in collaboration with others. Create a team of trusted friends who want to learn with you, and try several avenues. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has said, “It is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.”

There are no simple solutions here. None of us can transform our cognitive and emotional skills overnight. But we are capable of outthinking smart machines. My advice is that we start learning to do so now.